Prose Appreciation of Dundith's "The Wandering Bones"
1
The bones had been dormant for two million years. When they were dug out, they were mixed with a slight yellow color, a yellow color unique to China and Nihewan.
There are two rows of sharp canine teeth on the bone, as well as two 12-centimeter tusks, which are so sharp that they seem to pierce the body at any time. You can imagine that this monster sneaks up on you, suddenly bursts out, and opens a hole in your throat. You smell a thick smell of hot air in your nasal cavity. fear? Or thriller? All adjectives may fail.
It takes a minute to end a life, this monster is so quick. But its deadly opponent was no stronger than it. The ape-men in the Nihewan Basin defeated it with only the help of forged stones and sharpened branches, shouts and torches, patience and will, and the strength of their numbers.
Next to the bones are fir fossils. This plant appeared in the late Cretaceous period and has thrived on the earth for 65 million years. To this day, they are still carried proudly on the mountains and Xiaoxinan Mountains in Sichuan. head. They are still around, but the saber-toothed tiger is extinct.
Perhaps saber-toothed cats immigrated from the Americas. During the Ice Age, sea levels dropped, and they walked step by step along the exposed continental shelves in the Bering Strait, or the islands connected in a line. They have also gone through many hardships, but they still have not escaped the fate of being hunted.
They are at home everywhere, wherever there is jungle and freedom, there is home.
The firs in Mud River Bay seem to be no different from the firs in California. There are also some prehistoric birds singing in the high canopy.
The blue sky is the same, the only difference is that the land is a kind of yellow, thick, Chinese-flavored, soaked in the blood, and opening up the meridians.
This loess eventually buried and petrified them, forming pieces of silent bones. While alive, they travel in space; after death, they travel in time.
Everything is swimming, and fir seeds can fly. Birds are their prehistoric passenger planes, landing in guano and then settling down and growing in this fertile basin. The glaciers are cruising, and so are the coastlines. Both living and inanimate people regard cruising as their lifelong career and complete it with due diligence.
2
The bones are strange, like a horse or a cow. There is a cross section on the nasal bone, which may have a huge horn standing up; there is also a small bulge on the frontal bone, which may be It's the other horn. The combination of high and low and well-proportioned is a kind of beauty. The stupid rhinoceros also has a cute and cute side.
"The Classic of Mountains and Seas" is absurd, and there is always some truth in the absurd appearance. There is a saying in the scripture: "There is a beast, its shape is like a horse, and there is a mistake in one corner. Its name is 'Zhishu', and it can ward off fire." Probably this rhinoceros is the one who can ward off fire. Sima Qian did not believe that there were such strange animals in the world. They had become extinct before the Xia Dynasty. The bones dug out from the small beams in Guancun, Yangyuan County, give us a little more respect for the ancients. The 10,000-year oral history is also history. They have maintained a long-term interest in a disappearing animal.
The ancient Chinese people can record it in more detail. It has hair on its body. It is a woolly rhinoceros. Ten thousand years before history, it was running around Nihe Bay, and our ancestors were still catching it. I just don’t know whether to use it for barbecue or to avoid fire.
Its image traveled from this mouth to that ear, and was passed down from generation to generation, and then it became the "fire-preventing" mythical beast. Language is a living entity, growing and changing as it travels. Every time it is delivered, some information will be added, from food to monsters, from monsters to mythical beasts; the posture of the deliverer is constantly dwarfing, from looking levelly to looking up, and then from looking up to awe; From conquering a physical object to being conquered by a virtual image, this is the culture of God. God-makers weave myths and also weave cages. This cage imprisons others and also imprisons themselves.
The god of fire was traveling from north to south, and when he reached Sumatra, he lost his horns and fur and was almost on the verge of extinction. Although it is a close relative of the gods, no one worships it.
It is an imbecile in adapting to the environment and needs to be carefully cared for by humans in order to escape the fate of disappearing from the earth.
The earth is swimming, and it sings as it swims, and the singing is the erupting magma. One hundred thousand years ago, the Datong volcanoes erupted, destroying a 9,000-square-kilometer lake and creating a canyon. The lake water leaked eastward. The spectacular scene was only comparable to the Genesis Flood. Afterwards, there was left a basin suitable for the reproduction of life and a great river that nourished all living things. The sun shines on the Sanggan River, and all life is swimming.
Generations of gods roam, and gods are both constructive and destructive monsters.
The glaciers are swimming, and there are four major ice ages, which lasted hundreds of millions of years. The fourteen Pleistocene glaciations lasted over 100,000 years each. The warm interglacial period lasted only 10,000 to 20,000 years. Life, including humans, is just a group of passers-by lingering in the interglacial period.
No matter how you wander around, you will eventually turn into a pile of bones. The bones can speak, and they can tell the pain of the volcanic ash covering the sky and the sun. In the face of the huge natural force, all resistance is in vain. The bright, white glaciers will freeze those prosperous civilizations that have developed. Destroyed and resurrected several times, human beings are just a group of staggering bones walking in front of time.
Three
Horse bones have no hooves and each foot has three phalanges. A horse without hooves cannot run fast and can only be the prey of ferocious beasts. Having three toes and no wings is a tragedy. It can only rely on reproductive speed to make up for its lack of running speed. With a heavy appetite and indigestion, this magical horse walks on the ground and lacks restraint. It wants to eat more grass and covets a bigger pasture.
When inferior animals occupy high-quality resources, their demise is only a matter of time. Even if it evolved hooves, broadened its incisors, and degenerated its canines, it still wouldn't be able to gain any advantage.
The three-toed horse was the food of primitive people. It was easy to catch and tame. Some of the remaining bones evolved into stones over time. More of them should have found their way into human teeth than into saber-toothed tiger teeth. The collision of bone against bone is the main symphony of prehistoric times, more tragic than Beethoven's "Destiny."
If humans hadn’t discovered that a horse’s four legs could replace two human legs, the horse would have perished long ago. They should be honored and even proud to be slaves of humans. An animal that gallops on the grassland all year round finds happiness in losing its freedom. This is the philosophy of the horse.
The horse is a natural wanderer. As the body wanders, so does its identity. Horses have accompanied the entire ancient history of human society. Heroes such as Yao, Shun, Genghis Khan, and Nurhaci always regarded themselves as conquerors on horseback. Horses seem to be able to gain human dignity. They have a name that belongs to them, such as Wu Zui and Red Rabbit. Very few horses have been recorded in history. Most horses are just tools, used to pull carts and plow the fields, and to ride on their crotches. They are movable commodities with the attributes of things.
The horse is humble, don’t praise it, it is just a tool for walking with its head down. The strange thing is that because it is a tool, it multiplies in large numbers and becomes survivors who break away from nature and enter human society. Its types and numbers were once so prosperous that they made animals in nature jealous. Horses had long been alienated before humans were alienated.
Human beings have chosen it and will also eliminate it. With the arrival of automobiles, horses began to withdraw from the field, leaving only a few fine breeds remaining on the field. Those who are eliminated are all commoners, and those who remain are aristocrats. A racing horse is more expensive than a good car.
From food to transportation, from tools to pets, the horse made no mistakes. Its only mistake was to choose a god, a god who could tame it. Its destiny is completely determined by it. In the hand of this God.
A horse can look at a tree in the distance, a fir on a high mountain. A motionless life has the freedom to grow, but this animal with four hooves flying in the dust has no freedom.
Its ancestors were buried deep in the red soil of Nihewan, were excavated and displayed in the museum. It's in a zoo cage, chewing hay and acting as a living specimen.
It will say that God made a joke with it.
Four
Long curved ivory, crown-like protruding skull, a kingly look. This is the king of the Nihewan jungle, the Nama elephant. With its huge size and tough thick skin, it seems to have no opponent.
However, these bones are scattered, and there are signs of chopping and scraping, and their marrow has been sucked out. Bones and stones were piled together and processed to varying degrees. Obviously, this was the kitchen and dining room of primitive humans, where the elephant kings were slaughtered and eaten.
Perhaps it is a wish that eating it will make you extremely strong; perhaps it is a curiosity for its beautiful tusks; there is always a reason for humans two million years ago to be obsessed with the Nama elephant.
The result of obsession is killing, killing the baby elephant in front of the mother elephant, or killing the mother elephant in front of the baby elephant. The elephants can only watch helplessly. Death is not a rare thing. Death happens every day. Every day, we see different lives die. Living is the only meaning.
When the Nama elephant is cut up, the tusks will be carefully removed, and then a ritual will be performed to pray over the part of the body. Once life disappears, you can define it however you want, either as a god or as a ghost. The Nama elephant is very lucky. After serving as food, it is treated as a god. No matter men, women, old or young, they will express their wishes to the ivory. There are as many languages as there are wishes. Language may not be born in labor chants, but in prayer. The Nama elephant uses its tragic fate to promote the development and continuation of human civilization, which can be considered a contribution. Its flesh travels to human stomachs, and its teeth travel to human altars. This is a tooth sacrifice that has lasted for two million years. In Sanxingdui, you can still find a tooth, a long tooth.
The only way to escape group extinction is by cruising. Other types of elephants migrated south, adapting to the hotter environment. If you want to survive, you have to change yourself. This is evolution. Evolution may also be degeneration, nature is ruthless, and the advantages that have finally been transformed may turn out to be disadvantages in the face of disaster.
Every time we enter an ice age again, life has to reinvent itself. Those who change slowly will be eliminated.
The Nama elephants are the outcasts. They are too attached to the big lake in Nihewan and cannot get out of this jungle. This behemoth with a kingly temperament is actually squeamish. They have fur on their bodies, but it's not thick enough. Going south, they feel too hot, and going north, they feel too cold. So they lingered in this warm and humid Feng Shui land, waiting for humans to kill them all.
What survives is not this noble life, but some lowly and wandering life.
Five
Bones must be found, bones are so important. Balbo, Sang Zhihua, Teilhard de Chardin, Piveto, Buriye, and Jialanpo were all looking for them, looking at each layer, but the bones were hidden.
The Olduvai Gorge in East Africa is surprisingly similar to Nihewan. Since they found Eve, why can’t we find Pangu, Fuxi, and Nuwa?
There are a large number of stone tools and remains of ancient human activities in the soil layer of Maquangou that is between one million and two million years old, but there is not a single skull.
We miss a petroglyph. A painter from Cangyuan, Yunnan 20,000 years ago, painted the image of Pangu: with light on his head, an ax in his left hand, and a log in his right hand, with his legs upright, looking proud of the crowd.
Going back in time, it may be deconstructed, just like the god of fire is a woolly rhinoceros, maybe our Pangu is just an ordinary ape-man with a rough stone axe. , just killed a antelope, or two-pronged and four-pronged. Pangu, who opened up Hongmeng, was an ordinary man who struggled for three meals a day.
The god was shattered on the ground, perhaps only the skull, finger bones, and femurs were left, glowing with the blue light of stone. In a divine sense, we are embarrassed and cold-hearted; in a human sense, we feel a trace of moisture, warmth, and a slight heartbeat.
We see nature, and things that come naturally without modification.
This arrow points to the essence of life, which is tightly bound to nature. The other arrow points toward prosperity, the constant isolation of nature.
Human beings tend to gather more and more. In cities, the degree of civilization seems to be measured by how far away from nature it is, and the elegance, nobility, and fashion of life can be evaluated by how far away from nature it is.
Human beings swim in a rhythm separated from nature, turning themselves into gods. This god will eventually leave his body, implant his consciousness into a computer chip, and become an existence independent of living things. Then humans can roam in space without forests and grasslands, without air and oceans, and survive and develop on the lifeless Mars.
Any planet with monotonous colors can be immigrated, as long as there is energy, energy, and chemical elements.
In the dark, starry universe, on the spacecraft, we may miss a fir tree, its branches are still trying to touch the sky, and its thin leaves are still licking the sunlight. smell.
We miss the sparkling lips, the snuggle between flesh and flesh, every detail of the spring tide, and the bones that roamed the earth in pursuit of happiness two million years ago.